Where IP Storage Fits
The typical IT infrastructure of a large organization consists of a core data center, usually running the, company's mission critical applications. Up to 20% of the company's data assets are likely to be managed here. The rest 80% of the data is distributed among the company's regionals and departmental data centers and across the various remote offices around the globe.

The core data center usually houses the company's largest servers, is divided into production, and test and development environments, and is usually considered home base for corporate IT. The penetration of networked storage, as opposed to direct-attached storage, is likely to be up to 70% of the storage in the core data center-the vast majority being in the form of Fibre Channel SAN environments. Core data centers are most likely to have Fibre Channel savvy storage specialists, as well as Ethernet savvy server administrators.

This core data center may be duplicated at a remote facility for disaster recovery purposes, but the more likely scenario is that the disaster recovery facility is one of the company's regional or departmental data centers.

Regional and departmental data centers usually look quite different than the core data center. Servers here are likely to be smaller, and much more numerous. The applications running in these environments may not be mission-critical, but they are certainly business critical, and they are most likely to be driving significant data growth. And that data growth causes a constant staffing and asset management problem. The need for networked storage solutions is likely to be most acute here, but the penetration of networked storage is only likely to be around 30% -breaking down to a fairly even mix of network attached storage solutions and small SAN environments. This type of data center is unlikely to have either storage-focused or Fibre Channel savvy support staff.

Outside of the regional and departmental data centers, there will be a significant number of remote offices. These offices are now likely to employ not only desktop systems, but also a number of small servers, often running small enterprise applications. IT support for remote offices is often a problem, and data availability can be a real problem. Most companies are struggling with the issues of integrating these offices into their corporate data protection and management environment.

Interestingly, smaller organizations are likely to have a similar, multiple data center environment, but the core data center will look much more like the regional/departmental data center of a larger organization i.e, low networked storage penetration, low Fibre Channel SAN penetration.

The IP storage bridging technologies provide the basis for bridging existing Fibre Channel SAN environments, primarily for distance replication and disaster recovery. Over the past two  years, these technologies have been adopted by a wide range of organizations (from very large multinationals, to medium sized regionals), usually as part of an asset consolidation, business continuance or disaster recovery program. Customer case studies can be found on the websites of many leading storage and network infrastructure vendors.

iSCSI has seen extremely broad adoption over the past three years (again in both large and medium-sized organizations). Typically, iSCSI provides the basis for SAN storage solutions (primary storage) in environments where it was not considered to be feasible or cost effective.

IT infrastructure of a typical large enterprise

Today, iSCSI storage solutions are being deployed primarily in environments dominated by mid-range and low-end servers. These classes of server are most likely to be Intel-architecture servers running Windows, Novell NetWare or Linux operating systems, though solutions for small RISC servers running Unix are also emerging. The applications running here tend to be business-critical at the departmental level, though you do see mission-critical applications for smaller enterprises on these servers.

The most popular applications in these environments, therefore, are Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL fore, Server, and business applications running on top of smaller Oracle or IBM DB2 databases. Messaging, Web, commerce, and some technical applications (such as IBM Rational Clear Case) are also a good fit with iSCSI environments. Finally, customers with home grown applications running on smaller servers with internal or direct-attached storage are finding iSCSI a great storage consolidation solution, since the migration to an IP SAN is affordable and relatively painless. iSCSI is also a popular solution for secondary storage in this environment, disk-based storage for regulated or archive data.

Disk storage is often based on ATA drives and offers a cost per megabyte comparable with small tape silos, with the advantage of much faster data restore.

Low-end iSCSI solutions are also becoming popular as SAN solutions in remote offices, provide the performance and availability benefits of centralized storage. Solutions in this space often support file storage as in case of SAN/NAS convergence. If these remote office solutions are linked back to primary or secondary storage in the regional data center, the combination of remote replication and regular pointing time copies (snapshots), not only eliminates the backup in window and need for tape in the remote of office, but also delivers extremely high data availability. Customer case studies of iSCSI being used in producing IT environments are available on the websites of all the leading IP storage vendors.

Over the past three years, IP Storage has rapidly entered the IT mainstream, with products available from almost all the leading storage vendors, of offering secure, reliable and flexible new SAN options to their customers. Today, IP storage solutions are enabling organizations around the globe to maximize their existing IT investments while deploying efficient networked data management solutions.

David Dale
Industry Evangelist, NetApp, SNIA Board of Directors and Chair, IP Storage Forum
www.ipstorage.org
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in

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